Stand Out from The Competition

When we first started out in business, we looked about 12 and we had serious imposter syndrome

How were two fresh faced university graduates, ever going to stand out and compete against these other marketing companies that were ten years ahead of us, had a reputation, had experience and had lot’s of content already?

So we started tweeting and blogging, but to be honest, that didn’t have an immediate impact and we felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. Because, if you haven’t noticed – the world is only getting more and more overcrowded and oversaturated by the second, with everyone fighting for attention.

But what’s important to realise is that there’s different ways to help yourself stand out, and in this video and blog, we want to show you some of the things we’ve done to help us stand out in our field.

Have a personality

First up, we want you to really develop your brand’s personality, are you the type of brand that would dress up like robots, throw a pie in your brothers face and generally sometimes make a fool of yourself in the spirit of teaching your community about content marketing?

Sound familiar?

Good news is, you don’t have to be daft and silly like we can be sometimes, that’s just our unique brand…

BUT what you absolutely must do, is develop our unique brand and have that reflected through everything you’re creating, be it… written word, video, podcasting, live or even your web copy.

For small businesses and entrepreneurs your brand is often YOUR personality… so let that shine. We’re not saying you have to go OTT, but define what your brand personality is, and make sure it is consistently coming across in everything you are creating.

We got a huge list of brand values to get you started on this, just click here to get it.

Be Consistent

Standing out isn’t just about being a one hit wonder, it’s about consistently delivering and repeating your message so that over time, you stand out in people’s minds.

Persistence pays off, and when people check us out online – they can see we’ve created over 500 blogs and over 100 videos (yeh we can say that now) – and that has a big weight behind it.

Building your archive of content by being consistent has many benefits including massive SEO implications, more social media fodder, more time saved with repurposing…

… But also we’ve literally got 1000’s of pounds worth of speaking gigs and consultancy fees, from big events and even fortune 100 companies just because somebody has checked out our archive, said these guys look good… let’s book them.

Would you have had that with less than 10 piece of content? Chances are much slimmer!

So we cannot stress enough the importance of being consistent. Think of it like this… you will always have that first touch with somebody… this might be the FIRST time you’ve ever come across US! BUT if we didn’t keep up with content creation, you’d forget about us!

That’s why one of the best Calls to Action on free content is to subscribe for more, so your audience don’t forget about you.

Consistently Improve

Another way to Stand Out is to consistently improve.

This has 2 main benefits…

Number 1 – it allows you not to be perfect! Remember in video 50 we laughed at our cringey old videos…. who remembers the casual lean!? And even when we started this video channel, our delivery was less than perfect. But we know the more we do, the better we’ll get… and come video 200 we’ll be laughing at this one!

Number 2 – it’s good for your audience. People get BORED, how many people have you stopped watching or listening to because it’s the same old stuff. Constantly pushing to improve yourself – both in actual delivery and the quality of your content is going to keep your content fresh, which is going to ensure you STAND OUT in your audience’s mind for longer!

Outsource to experts

Outsourcing to experts helps you STAND OUT. Because people are better than you at some things than you! That’s the truth!

We thought we were pretty good at editing our videos, but when we started to outsource our video editing – the retention rate on our videos doubled!

Outsourcing also frees up your time to do other things, that can help you stand out even more… potentially some of the things we’ve talked about in this blog.

Especially when it comes to standing out online… you don’t have to be doing it all! If you’re not sure whether outsourcing straight away is worth it, you can do what we did with these video… prove the model, then outsource.

We edited the first 50 videos ourselves, proved to us that consistent videos were worth doing. Then we hired our SUPER talented editor Christina… who has been on Team A&P for a year now.

Let people in

Finally we want you to let people in. You could call this storytelling, you could call this ‘being human’, what we want you to do is stop being shy, and think to yourself… when you’re creating content online, or trying to stand out… how can you add some more of your personal story into the content?

The aim of Content Marketing and standing out online is to build trust and attention… and humans that are 100% perfect aren’t always that trustworthy!

If someone can get to know you, and they can relate to you because you’re not perfect, and only then can they can start to like and trust you.

So don’t feel bad about sharing something you’ve learned, or something that didn’t work, or embarrassing business fails… like Pete’s modelling career.

These don’t have to be BIG LIFE CHANGING moments either, when planning content, we ALWAYS try think if there’s any personal stories or things we’ve learned that we can share

THANK YOU

Guys thank you so much for sticking around for 100 of these videos! We love doing them, and are so thankful for every view, comment, share and message you’ve sent it. Here’s to the next 100!